Many Happy Returns

 "I want the whole man!"--Ian McKellan

I would tell you that I have been stalled for many days on a Substack piece about the McCormack Oz race which I would like to finish, with hopefully some relevant insight, before the November election results are tallied, with a Shapiro victory most likely assured as Wolf’s heir apparent, but this is only a partial truth, while I reflect on Patrick McGoohan’s Number 6 caught in a rubber room, an analog rubber room, for making a disruptive choice which the MI6 of nearly 60 years ago didn’t like. McGoohan didn’t create The Prisoner as a critique of the British welfare state, but the boomerang nature of The Village is a great deal like being a rat in a maze of the Commonwealth’s static, and blisteringly deadly Waiver services. Like Enka Kohat's Shubert of 21 years ago, the mind attempts to rally around the cauterized despair burbling about like raspberry jam, knowing it’s doomed, resisting electro shocks, brainwashing, various ruses designed to make the agent believe he can outwit the closed circuit cameras, and those malignant capture balloons, no realism here in this 17 episode carnivalesque farce, but The Prisoner is violent, paranoid, anticipating Guantanamo Bay despite its cartoonish exaggeration. The series withstands age even with the knowledge that the Soviet Union is dead, in definitive terms. While I am surprised at the quick success of Zelenskyy’s counteroffensive, any student of modern Russia knew Putin was in trouble when Shoigu couldn’t bring about Kyiv’s collapse. However long it may be until Putin is deposed, or not, this sinking writer doesn’t think Ukraine is entirely free from the threat of the Russian Bear, but the nail in Stalin’s coffin has been sealed, We can breathe a small sigh of relief.

Re (Assignment)

"It is people like you, William, who are destroying the moral fabric of the country."-- Patrick McGoohan, Anglicized reactionary

Outland's cultural interplay  operates on levels with a number of tranches. It is an obvious homage by Hyams to High Noon, which in itself isn't really a western, but a question about what kind of country America is, but the narrative is also about Connery's frustration with the Fleming formula. It has its weak spot, the worshipful wife doing an early version of Skype. Kira projects Carol O'Niel as little more than a moon child who wants to be dominated by self-made virility. Don't we all. Beyond this, it offers a fulfilling neo-realism which makes the difficulty of transliterating science fiction all the more rewarding, posited in a plausible futurist technocratic frailty. Walter Hill may not have had a direct influence on Hyams's work, but someone was paying attention.

Methink's Hill's protestations out forced gender switching are disingenuous, but I am not ready to challenge an entertainment icon on his understated political consciousness,  and prefer to go through O'Neal first, and know I have to move: the man is sick, seemingly in need of money-- but I am also barely holding it together. My "essay-ish" piece on The Driver is not slated for Rolling Stone, as its cultural insulation makes me queasy: Wenner switched sides, thus not invalidating arguments about sexuality and choice-- but in recent searches, debated pitching the entertainment icon a slant. It would not hurt. Freelancers get ignored hundreds of times a day-- but I am staying my hand, as they seem to already eat Hill like ice cream. I am trying to probe a little more deeply, much as the juxtapositions in The Prisoner keep the viewer off balance. It too is science fiction dressed up like a primitive comic book (much like The Good Place, which sends up smugness rather cheaply and isn't enough).

For now, this is all I can manage. If I haven't broken the law and assaulted Trudy Richardson, at week's end, perhaps I will have crept through my own physiological torments enhanced by corruption.

Behind The Bars Schematic, With Sharp Hazel Glint

I never knew Patrick McGoohan was American born. I thought he was British, and his image was carefully crafted as such, that precursor to James Woods' hypermania. Perhaps I could go desecrate his grave and go out on a weird news item. I got up late and watched the tiresome Danes of Unit One despite myself and inadvertently went down memory lane with All Night Long, ate a little and managed no further misadventures on the toilet, and honestly do not know if I am dying due to my cop down to nicotine vapor, or if it is just the stress of generically bad medical equipment and that I need a shower and a better mattress. Acceptance. Seven stages of death, or aggrandizement of allergies, and I'm still in the process of sniveling to the Philadelphia police force. Can't get a lawyer? Whine to the enforcers and all the sudden you can die in Kafka's comic moral guilt. My fall in oh 2007 was actually serious. I was in my badly fitted manual Quickie I purchased for 810 on my own dime, and flipped accidentally wedging my left breast on the feline carrier. I thought I was going to die, and to make a long story short a rendezous with Geek Squad led the guard to my door but the stitch under my armpit is constant and if it is cancer it certainly isn't being aggressive.

I did actually see most of The Prisoner on PBS, and unfortunately cannot refresh my memory either through Amazon's avarice or AT&T's lassitude with their garrulous disabled customer, but the series is certainly a cult status farce with deep seated roots in the satirical tradition, and I'm interested in expanding its allegorical bent; for that reviewing is necessary. What McGoohan did well as a performer was offer the reassurance of definition and then fracture it. But let me go for now. I am trying to stay comfortable enough to work and shut off my "I cannot go on" outcry and work and remain upset that I managed nothing and had to log on because of the omnipresent automatic updates. I'm studying what I watch for a blog which really pleases my own interests, when I started what ten years ago was new fangled, all the rage, blogging, and it's already dead. Damned if I understand online ebbs and trends, but I cannot work and study every fucking video under my nose and make myself homeless to really shorten my death by COPD. Hopefully, I'll be back in a few days.